"Under Ben Bulben". The Mountain of Myth over Yeats'
Dead Body

It is perhaps self-evident than any account of the effect or
history of mountains will be more of a reconstruction of imaginative
projections than any precise rendering of objective facts. This
point has certainly been made clear in Robert McFarlane's recent
study of this history, which fittingly bears the title Mountains
of the Mind.(1) In the
case of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, the self-reflective
nature of the human encounter with mountains can be said to be
underlined and intensified. In this paper I would like to draw
an outline of Yeats' idealism with regard to mountains, and then
contest that very same idealism. This will be done through an
interpretation mainly focused on his famous poem "Under Ben
Bulben." The poem's attempt to use a mountain as an instrument
for the commemorative establishing of a harmonised and idealised
self-image will be shown to be embroiled in contingencies and
conflicting memories.

Evidence of Yeats' idealism can be gleaned from one of the
prefaces to A Vision, where he takes time to appreciate
his current physical surroundings in the small Italian town of
Rapallo. The effect the mountains of Rapallo have on him is especially
noted: "these mountains under their brilliant light fill
one with an emotion that is like gratitude," Yeats writes,
"the mountain road from Rappalo to Zoagli seems like something
in my own mind, something that I have discovered."(2) There is something very characteristic about
this response. For Yeats, a mountain-and more generally any natural
landscape-is easily elided into something transcendental and inner.
Like an individualised Platonic memory, or anamnesis, the
mountain gives back what was already the property of the mind
and is a mirroring monument of human thought's own magnificence.

When Yeats writes these words in Rapallo, in 1927, his gratitude
to the mountains is no doubt linked to the restorative effects
the mild climate of this resort town has had on his recent illness.
Eleven years later, in an important poetical testament, he will
declare his desire to be buried below the solid mass of another
protecting mountain. "Under Ben Bulben" is the poem
that famously spells out Yeats' wish for his body to be placed
in the Drumcliff churchyard by the flank of a Sligo mountain.
It was published, significantly enough, just five days after his
death. The mountain Ben Bulben has long been associated both with
protection and revelation for the local population of the Sligo
region on the West Coast of Ireland. In an early prose text, Yeats
mentions a folk rhyme celebrating the two big mountains that frame
the town: "But for Ben Bulben and Knocknarea," the rhyme
goes, "Many a poor sailor'd be cast away."(3) This is from the early volume The Celtic
Twilight, in which Yeats documents the local customs and beliefs
linked with the supernatural. In several other texts of the same
volume, Ben Bulben is described as being a place redolent with
faeries and mythological significance. In an important anticipation
of the poetical will of the later poem, The Celtic Twilight
also links the mountain with superhuman horsemen, who every night
ride forth from an opening in the mountain. Here is one of Yeats'
descriptions: "When the aged countrywoman stands at her door
in the evening and, in her own words, 'looks at the mountains
and thinks of the goodness of God,' God is all the nearer, because
the pagan powers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben,
famous for hawks, the white square door swings open at sundown,
and those wild unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields."(4)

These supernatural horsemen-identified with the Irish faeries
called Sidhe-return at the beginning of "Under Ben Bulben,"
where they "ride the wintry dawn / Where Ben Bulben sets
the scene" (10-11). They also recur in the finale of the
poem, with the famous inscription to Yeats' grave: "Cast
a cold eye / On life, on death, / Horseman, pass by!" (VI,
9-11). By virtue of an act of cold passion, Yeats thus implicitly
links his own limestone grave with the perspective of the mythical
riders passing through the limestone "door of Faeryland"
on the side of Ben Bulben.(5)
Granted this transcendental perspective, Yeats can aspire to a
prophetic vision unifying the Irish people. In the process, the
poet also practically stages his own beatification-or what one
biographer has called his "self-iconization."(6)

Yeats' persona thus speaks to us, as it were, from a mountaintop.
In the process, he draws upon the general mythical authority of
mountains, which he discusses more explicitly in an essay entitled
"The Holy Mountain." In that essay he states: "To
Indians, Chinese, and Mongols, mountains from the earliest times
have been the dwelling-place of the Gods. Their kings before any
great decision have climbed some mountain." There is a universal
link between such elevated sites and human revelation, characteristic
not only of the East, but also of the West. "We too,"
Yeats writes, "have learnt from Dante to imagine our Eden,
or Earthly Paradise, upon a mountain, penitential rings upon the
slope."(7) The summoning
of the more local and personal reference of the Irish mountain
of Ben Bulben can be seen as a typically symbolist manoeuvre on
the poet's part, whereby a universal exigency-shared by the classics
of both the Occident and the Orient-is embodied in a local habitat.

The universality of the symbolic mountain is made even clearer
in an earlier text. In a key anticipation of "Under Ben Bulben,"
Yeats' autobiographical text "Four Years" (included
in The Trembling of the Veil) celebrates how public spaces
can function as unifying emblems for both individuals and communities:
"a nation or an individual" will thus be endowed with
some form of "symbolical" or "mythological coherence"
with which to organise the data of their experience. This coherence
must have some form of localised particularity:

I would not endure, however, an international art, picking
up stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health
and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound;
Patrick or Columbkil, or Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus' stead;
and instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not
all races had their first unity from a mythology, that marries
them to rock and hill?(8)

Significantly, Yeats contrasts his own desire of creating such
a cultural fulcrum with the endeavour of the English romantic
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ben Bulben and Cro-Patrick are specifically
Irish alternatives to the Caucasus landscape evoked by the author
of Prometheus Unbound. Yet for Yeats the essential workings
of poetry are constant: the localised symbol is the only kind
of symbol, a necessary embodiment of universality in the individual
instant.

There is reason, however, to be wary of the way in which this
familiar symbolist strategy is enacted in "Under Ben Bulben."
A poem is not a heavenly edict, however skilfully some writers
create such an illusion, and-more specifically-however impressive
and forcceful Yeats' poetical "command" (VI, 8) may
be. I would therefore like to suggest a couple of ways in which
Yeats' text can be brought back to earth. Firstly, I'd just like
to make a brief point of something recently stressed in Brenda
Maddox's biography on Yeats. Maddox has showed that, for all the
poet's staging of his own commemoration, there was a considerable
amount of confusion around the actual process of his burial. Yeats
died in France just before the outbreak of World War II, and in
order to fulfil his wish of a Sligo burial his body had to be
exhumed over nine years later. By then the French authorities
had moved his remains to an ossuary, and there seems to be a good
chance that his bones were mixed up with-or even wholly mistaken
for-those of some other corpse. In light of the poem "Ben
Bulben," this possibility of dismemberment strikes an ironic
note, since the poem is itself in part devoted to a celebration
of bodily harmony and integrity. Irish poets are admonished to
follow the example of Michelangelo's elevated bodies, and "Scorn
the shape now growing up / All out of shape from toe to top"
(V, 3-4). An organic and idealised body is thus linked closely
to the poet's remains, even if those remains in practice were
submitted to a haphazard and ignoble process of dismemberment
and tentative reassembly.

Secondly, and more suggestively perhaps, there is a lack of
identity between the poem "Under Ben Bulben" and Yeats'
actual gravestone. Text and paratext uneasily straddle each other
here, effectively undermining the possibility of constructing
any single, integrally constituted work. For the Irish poet's
testament is effectively broken apart, as the visitor to the Drumcliff
churchyard only encounters its famous last three lines rather
than whole poem of "Under Ben Bulben." Those last words
also acquire a different inflection on their own: "Cast a
cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by!" The horseman
in question becomes partially identified with the visitor or poetic
pilgrim reading these lines, and as a result the adjuration also
acquires a subtly different reference. The horseman is no longer
implicitly identified with supernatural beings, nor is he linked
with the "hard-riding country gentlemen" (V, 8) mentioned
in passing in the fifth section of the poem. The reader encountering
the epitaph is cut off from such contexts, and is tempted to identify
with the horseman, embracing a stoicism that can distance itself
from all such mortal matters. The horseman, one could say, is
set loose, and is saddled upon a more unruly nag than the stately
marching Pegasus of the poet.

A good parallel to the resulting open-endedness of the epitaph's
interpellation can be found in the epitaph of one of Yeats' contemporaries,
Rainer Maria Rilke. It has long been well known that Yeats wrote
"Under Ben Bulben" under the influence of Rilke, moved
by a desire to escape the Austrian poet's supposedly quietist
acceptance of mortality in his self-penned epitaph. But there
has been little interest among Yeats scholars in the actual wording
of Rilke's text. In many ways a more gnomic poem than Yeats' one,
it nevertheless shares a certain sense of open-ended address:

[Rose, o pure contradiction,
desire to be no one's sleep
under so many eyelids.](9)

The cryptic combination of the words "Niemandes"
(meaning "no one's") and "soviel Lidern" (meaning
"so many eyelids" - but also evocative of "Lieder"
(songs) and the petals of a rose) has been at the centre of a
large number of differing interpretations. The most relevant aspect
in this context is the way in which it can be said to stage an
allegory of reading. Both this poem and poetry in general (in
Rilke's symbolist conception of it) can be said to direct itself
towards an ideal reader, and this ideal reader is to be born as
a form of absence (a "no one"), a virtual and ungraspable
entity, through the dispersed perceptions (the many eyes) of its
actual readers. In short, Rilke's epitaph not only dramatises
the arbitrariness of its own reception-it actually embraces it.

In the case of Yeats' epitaph, matters are-despite the simpler
tone of his text-less clear-cut. Suffice to say, that where "Under
Ben Bulben" would seem to insist upon a mythological backdrop
for its own reception, the epitaph has to fend its way without
such a specification. The horseman's identity becomes open for
various interpretations., although we do perhaps have recourse
to at least one way of limiting the field somewhat. In a reading
of the various drafts of this poem, Jon Stallworthy has noted
the general importance of horses for Yeats' writings:

the horse for Yeats was a symbol of spirited and courageous
nobility, and time and again in his poems he refers to the good
horsemanship of those whom he admires-such as Robert Gregory,
Con Markiewicz, and George Pollexfen.(10)

All of the figures mentioned by Stallworthy, and no doubt many
more, can be said to lurk in the environs, or associative force
field, of the poem. Yet the second of these three names is particularly
relevant. For there is one other instance, in Yeats' poetry, of
a human rider passing through the same area close to Sligo. It
is the only other occasion where the poet uses the very same words:
"Under Ben Bulben." This occurs in the poem titled "On
a Political Prisoner," published in 1920, which is one of
a handful of poems by Yeats that celebrates the memory of Countess
Markiewicz, born Constance Gore-Booth. Markiewicz was a member
of the Protestant Ascendancy of Sligo but would later become a
revolutionary icon, fighting against the very class in which she
grew up. Yeats' vision of her riding by the mountain is a nostalgic
one, evoking an early promise and poise that he contrasts to her
later revolutionary stridency: "When long ago I saw her ride
/ Under Ben Bulben to the meet, / The beauty of her country-side
/ With all youth's lonely wildness stirred" (13-16).

The presence of this young rider under Ben Bulben is no accident.
Like her sister, the radical mystic Eva Gore-Booth, Countess Markiewicz
grew up in the Protestant Big House called Lissadell, only a few
miles away from the mountain and even closer to Drumcliff churchyard.
As Yeats' poem "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz"
makes clear, Markiewicz is understood by the poet to be a treasonous
figure. Whereas Lady Gregory's Coole Park was threatened by an
outside enemy-the new Catholic rule of Ireland-Markiewicz was
an internal threat. She challenged the values of her family home
in Lissadell by denying her own birthright and the values of her
Protestant Ascendancy family. It is perhaps suggestive to note
that while Yeats chose to link his own survival with the paternal
Ben Bulben, the countess opted to link her own legacy with a more
maternal mountain. She gave her daughter the name Maeve, in a
gesture of homage and with respect to the mythical queen Maeve.
Queen Maeve's legendary grave is on Knocknarea-the mountain facing
Sligo from the south-western side rather than the north of Ben
Bulben.(11)

It is said that Countess Markiewicz used to quote poetry when
she climbed Knocknarea-more specifically, the line "Does
the road wind up-hill all the way?" from Christina Rossetti's
poem "Up-Hill." In Yeats' poetry, Markiewicz will always
be riding "Under Ben Bulben," rather than struggling
up-hill at Knocknarea. Nevertheless her commemoration in his poetry
has something vulnerable and depleted about it. For scholars have
claimed that Markiewicz is in fact only a poetical substitute
or stand-in for Yeats' true love, the famous Irish revolutionary
Maud Gonne. As was the case with Markiewicz, Yeats saw Gonne as
a beautiful woman who had lost her grace due to a fanatical nationalist
fervour. The poet also once indeed told a friend that he wrote
poems about Markiewicz in order to work out arguments he had had
with Gonne.(12)

Thus the memory of Countess Markiewicz has been placed under
erasure. This has perhaps been done a little too hastily. With
regard to Yeats' actual poetry, it is significant that he himself
first raises the theme of covert expressions of his love for Maud
Gonne in a poem called "The Old Age of Queen Maeve."
"O unquiet heart," the speaker of the poem asks himself,
"Why do you praise another praising her, / As if there were
no tale but your own tale / Worth knitting to a measure of sweet
sound?" Yet Yeats was a notorious myth-maker with regard
to his own biography, and there is no more reason to fully endorse
the unifying simplifications inherent in his amatory constructions
than there is to accept Dante's similar argument in Vita Nuova.
Where the Italian poet would explain away every relation that
did not involve Beatrice, Yeats does something similar with regard
to his beloved Maud Gonne. Both simplify the complexities of their
own love life, surrendering all ambivalence and diversity to a
fairly straightforward tale of thwarted (yet idealised and inspiring)
desire.

Colm Tóibín has described the use Yeats' friend,
Lady Gregory, made of Irish myths as an "invention"
of an "uncomplicated tradition."(13) Certainly Yeats' own literary investment
in myth often betrays a similar tendency. Yet close attention
to the details of his texts and their context quickly reveals
more ambivalent and multifaceted structures. As I've already pointed
out, Queen Maeve is a mythical figure intrinsically linked with
Yeats' own Sligo background-specifically with her legendary burial
site on Knocknarea. So in writing "The Old Age of Queen Maeve"
Yeats is drawing-as a semi-covert screen of his love for Maud
Gonne-upon a mythical backdrop linked with even earlier memories
of the mountainous landscape of Sligo. In his Memoirs,
Yeats recollected that "all through my boyhood" Countess
Markiewicz had been a significant part of that landscape. She
"had been romantic to me [...]. I heard now and then [of]
some tom-boyish feat or of her reckless riding, but the general
impression was always that she was respected and admired."(14)

This reckless rider will always be linked to the mountain called
Ben Bulben. We may wish to forget or ignore her, and leave the
Yeatsian symbols of Ben Bulben and Maud Gonne in restful peace.
Yet an attentive, truly remembering reading cannot do so. Constance
Markiewicz remains a disturbing presence on the margins of Yeats'
poetical universe-being no legendary figure of love, like Maude
Gonne, nor quite fitting in with the sanitised self-presentation
of the poet's self-canonising monument. Instead she points towards
unresolved complexities of both an erotic and a political nature.
While Yeats meant to embrace Ben Bulben in a symbolic force field
signifying an elevated and unified conception of the Irish nation,
the mountain is thus also a reminder of the divisions and differences
of Irish culture. Mountains can bring peoples together, giving
them a common iconic point of focus and coign of vantage, but
they are also-despite acts of idealisation and sublimation-sites
where memories of contention and division remain inscribed.